Resplendence
by cupid-painted-blind
Summary: Merope Gaunt's final hours, as she thinks about blood purity and how very wrong she's been. Oneshot.


**Resplendence**

She'd heard of the disease before, a terrible germ that infected muggle women and caused them to die while in their teens or early twenties, but she'd never heard of a witch getting consumption.

Not that it mattered now, she thought, as she hacked more blood into a muddy handkerchief. Clearly, purity of blood had little to do with how the lungs reacted to tuberculosis, and she was suffering that reaction violently now. It was no wonder he had left her, pitiful, ugly, and forsaken as she was. He hadn't even known she was pregnant.

If not for her protruding belly, she would have looked painfully anorexic. She didn't even know how the baby survived when she barely ate enough to shut her stomach up each day. But it did, and it thrived, and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that her life would end as that baby's began.

It was the only thing that gave her hope.

But she had no clue what would happen to it without her. She had no family she wished it to return to – if they were even out of Azkaban yet – no friends to take care of it, and she knew of no orphanages to let the child live in. All she had were ten galleons that would never buy a growing baby its future, especially not on the eastern half of muggle London. She'd have better luck going to Whitechapel and asking Jack the Ripper to return from the grave.

She wished she had asked the man in the store for more. But she'd been hopeless and afraid, and he'd looked violent and she'd just taken the first offer he'd thrown out, desperate to get rid of the locket that had helped to make her life hell. She had needed money painfully, and a quick fix was all she had time left for.

The baby was going to come any day now, and she was going to die when it did. What was the point in getting large sums of gold if she could never even use it? And considering the condition she was living in, she doubted her child would have much use for it either.

She closed her eyes at the streetcorner and recalled Hogwarts. She had never really been, only a year and then her father had assumed that, because her marks were less than perfect, she was a squib and had no place among the mudbloods. He had assumed that no one could break her of her lack of magical ability better than he could.

All he had done was break her magical ability.

She coughed up more blood. A woman on the street discreetly looked away. She wanted to cry.

The sickness was painful, burrowing into her ribcage like a cancer – which it wasn't far from – and tearing into her very soul. How had she ever been reduced to this? She was one of Slytherin's heirs, for God's sake, how could she be so pitiful?

_Maybe because all that pure blood doesn't mean a damn thing._

It was so clearly a lie that it wasn't even funny. How could a person's ancestry define who they are? It was absurd really, and she'd bought into it her whole life. But if a witch could die of consumption, especially a pureblood descendant of Salazar Slytherin, then maybe the lines between magical and not weren't really as strong as her father seemed to think.

Maybe they didn't exist at all.

But she had no one with which to share this dazzling revelation, and at any rate, she had a feeling that the rest of the world already had it figured out. Her family always had been rather backwater and cold.

She turned to the small, warmly lit home across the street. Twilight was falling, and the images she could see through the window made her ache for the life she'd had once. Only for a few months, when life had been a dream, when he'd whispered sweet nothings in her ear, when he'd held her and given her safety, when she had slipped love potion in his drink and had given herself a taste of resplendence. But then her conscience had caught up with her and she'd foolishly believed that he'd love her anyway.

That woman in that house was beautiful and kind and needed no liquid love to earn those looks from her husband. They had a delicious-smelling turkey that played with her stomach and caused the baby to squirm for food, and they had a family that played with her heartstrings and made her wish for heaven.

She had a sneaking suspicion that she'd thrown away her heaven for a fabricated love and ten galleons. It made her sick.

She turned away again to cough again, and by the time the fit had subsided, the woman had closed the curtains and taken the turkey to another room, where she could no longer smell it. Her stomach growled in the loss of temptation.

She groaned under the baby's weight and started trying to find a comfortable doorstep for tonight. It'd have to be covered. It looked like rain.

The days were quickly getting shorter, and she found herself relishing the fact that she wouldn't have to survive a winter like this; pregnant and consumed with tuberculosis. It was a good thing, she supposed, that she'd been relatively healthy this time last year. In fact, a year ago, she'd been with him.

Forcing herself not to think back to a year ago (_when she'd had a warm bed and a warm body next to hers and enough to eat and the ability to actually do magic for once_), she stumbled past the turkey-maker's house and down the darkening street with difficulty. She jerked her threadbare shawl closer around her and sniffled before dissolving into yet another coughing fit.

It was getting frighteningly close to her time, and yet she couldn't see a reason to be afraid. There was nothing for her to live for and no reason to suspect that her baby would give her one. It would probably die without a mother or a home in the cold and the rain within days anyway, why should she get her hopes up about it?

The gathering cold around her just made it feel worse.

She finally found a covered doorstep that looked thankfully abandoned and collapsed, head knocking against the door as she did so. She half hoped that someone would answer the door and try to help her. But no one came.

Collecting her courage, she eased open the door. The house was empty, just as she'd hoped, but there was nothing even for her to use as a pallet or a blanket. Just bare walls and floors, with a rickety, rotting staircase on her left that led into an inky void. She didn't want to see what was upstairs.

Merope had always hated the darkness, and she knew that tonight would be a very dark night. She'd be safer in this room, she knew, but the threatening blackness of that staircase made her turn to find a new home for tonight. She wandered aimlessly through the streets, watching the already dark clouds grow more ominously black with the coming night. It was terrifying. She knew she'd have to find some place with light to stay tonight, or she'd never go to sleep.

And she lived for her dreams far too much to relinquish her sleep.

The warm water trickling down her leg, coupled with the contraction that wracked her body – causing another fit of coughing that lasted longer this time – let her know that it was time, and she had nowhere to stay.

She found another sheltered doorstep and collapsed, letting out a scream as another contraction tore through her stomach. This time, however, someone answered the door.

"Now who could be – Oh!" A rather short and ugly woman reached down and pulled Merope up from the ground and, with the help of another, much younger but no less ugly, woman, she dragged her to a bed as she screamed and coughed again.

"I can't tell if she's got TB or just a cold…"

"It doesn't matter, Meredith, she's having a baby! Fetch the midwife, now!" The first woman barked to the second, and Meredith ran out the door. "Now, my dear, where's the baby's father?"

It was easier to lie than explain the truth, so Merope gasped, "He's dead." The woman looked sympathetic, but was obviously wondering why any man would want such an ugly wife as her. She wanted to hit the woman, and nevermind what she was doing for her.

The baby came surprisingly quickly, in a flurry of pain and blood and coughing and screaming, and Merope thought that she must be the only person to feel death before it came, as she had never felt so devoid of life as in the last moments of hers.

"It's a boy, my dear. What shall his name be?"

"Tom. That's his father's name." She muttered, feeling the darkness closing in, and, like a terrified animal, tried to cling to the light and tear the black away. "Marvolo for my father." The woman didn't know that she'd been muttering indecisions, and nodded.

"Tom Marvolo, then… What's your last name?" Gaunt. Slytherin. Riddle.

"Riddle."

And serve the bastard right, she thought, seconds before she died.

She never really knew which bastard she meant.


End file.
